#shhd

I've had an interesting relationship with horror throughout my life. Most people get into the genera as a kid (when they shouldn't) and as a kid I didn't really like it. Gore and violence made me uncomfortable and the slower spooky parts in-between were. Well. Slower and spooky. I didn't like being scared.

But I was always jealous of what horror had. The monsters, the mystery, the lore (which would often times ruin the first two but I nonetheless found engaging).

Over the years I've dabbled in things that interest me like the first Nightmare on Elm Street and most of the Evil Dead franchise but so far I've avoided survival horror games. Which is weird cause that’s, like, what I spend most of my time on!

So here I am, 27 years old, having never played a Resident Evil or Silent Hill game, series that are older than I am and are still getting new entries, and I feel like I’m missing out. These are very important entries in gaming history and having played NONE of them creates this awkward gap in my overall experiences. So I'm playing as many as I can now.

I'll be using this blog to chronicle that experience playing, essentially, a new genera of game for me. I'll be posting clips of my livestreams in addition to general musings about the games and my relationship with horror. If that sounds interesting to you, then give me a follow on this blog,

I want to get something out of the way right at the start, this isn’t a blog that encompasses any and all games you can constitute as “horror”.

My general rule is that I am focusing on the brand of survival horror coined and popularized by the original Resident Evil where you are given tools and weapons to fight whatever horror you’re facing.

I’m allowing myself a degree of flexibility when it comes to this, Resident Evil basically becomes an action game by RE4, which created a whole genera of horror themed action shooters like Dead Space and Evil Within, but I’ll be more likely to play Fatal Frame and Choo Choo Charles than Five Nights at Freddy’s or Slenderman.

The reason for this is fairly simple, most horror games that exist, the large large majority of them, suck ass. One of the reasons I’ve avoided the genera is not only because of an aversion to spookiness but also because a LOT of horror games are genuinely terrible and for very consistent reasons. When you don’t have weapons to fight against an enemy it means you have limited ways of interacting with an enemy AI in a way to keep yourself from dying. And have you SEEN the way developers make AI? It’s the WORST!